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Strogg
The Strogg are a hostile cybernetic alien race featured as the main antagonists in the Quake II and Quake 4 video games, and recently in Enemy Territory: Quake Wars. The Strogg are cybernetic constructs of unclear origins that reproduce by taking biological components and fusing them with advanced technology in the crude process of stroggification, overriding the subjects' own thoughts with a device known as a neurocyte that slaves them to the vast and highly efficient Strogg Communication Network. The Strogg also require protein from dead flesh to create a substance known as stroyent, which is vital to them for nourishment and the lubrication of their vast industrial complex. They are entirely devoted to military and industrial activity, which has made their technology in such fields far more advanced than that of any other known civilisation. They maintain this massive military and industrial complex on their homeworld, Stroggos, which is heavily defended with various security installations and fully fledged to launch assaults on other worlds. The Strogg's need to harvest biological components for their own augmentation, and the flesh of slain enemies for the creation of stroyent, is their primary motivation, since it is neccessary for their survival. It is this motivation that led the Strogg to Earth, a planet with a massive human population, which they promptly staged a massive unexpected invasion of almost immediately upon discovery. All of a sudden the Strogg became the greatest threat to Earth's survival and especially targeted densely populated areas such as major cities, with much of the world's population being slaughtered and harvested. Eventually the human war machine got in gear and scored several decisive victories against the Strogg in a counterattack that would drive them off-world. Though humanity drove the Strogg off Earth, the threat of a renewed invasion was still high and Earth's resources were too depleted to successfully repel a second such attack. As a result, humans began counter-invasion against the Strogg homeworld. This invasion was initially a disaster, with nearly all drop pods destroyed on entry by the Strogg's massive planetary defence cannon known as the "Big Gun". By some miracle, a lone marine survived this disastrous landing and made a one-man insurgency on Stroggos using commando tactics, in which he demolished the Big Gun and assassinated an entity known as the Makron, which had functioned as the Strogg's leader. However, the war did not end there, as the Strogg proved to be extremely resilient and as the war went on they regrouped, constructing a new and more powerful Makron. The humans launched another invasion in the belief that the Makron's death threw the Strogg into disarray. They learned the Strogg's real weakness was the Nexus, the central component of the Strogg Communication Network, and in a disastrous but neccessary series of operations they succeeded in destroying it. This flung the Strogg military into disarray, giving a window of time for the human forces to knock out the remaining key Strogg facilities in their ongoing war. It is still conceivable, however, that the Strogg Communications Network may come back online since it is highly advanced and likely has many failsafe systems. Possible origins There are various theories about the Strogg's origins. Some have said that the Strogg are the remnant of a massive war long ago, a military structure that was left without purpose but continued to carry out its mission to conquer even when the original war had ended and their own original allies and enemies had died out. Other theories include that the Strogg were once an alien race, perhaps not different to humans, and their world may have once been like Earth. However, their practice of cybernetic augmentation to keep themselves alive, as well as mutation and nanotechnology, may have changed them, and over time their forms were altered so much that there is nothing left of the original "Strogg" species or any concrete evidence it even existed. All that remains in the Strogg is the steel and merciless will to conquer, perhaps some echo of their ambitions long ago before they were twisted beyond recognition. There is no existing evidence of the Strogg ever being independent, creative and thinking beings, as their activity seems to be co-ordinated by various control nodes, devices, the neurocytes within their brains and of course the Nexus itself. However, for them to have achieved their state as cybernetic beings would have required creative minds, however long dead by now, a long time ago in their past. It is possible that the Strogg were assembled as a highly adaptive army to protect some other species, but they may have become so advanced that they disregarded their own masters and became resource-hungry in their pursuit of the one item their existence requires- biological components from other (preferably humanoid) species. This desire for biological components led the Strogg to Earth which had become a hub for various interstellar civilisations, and the result was their sudden and devastating attack on it. A lot can be told from Matthew Kane's words about the Strogg: "created for war, and fueled by the blood of their enemy". This supports the aforementioned idea that the Strogg are supersoldiers left from a major war long ago, since their reliance on enemy bodies as their resource effectively means that the enemy's dead are their source of power. This being said, it means that the Strogg literally feed on death itself, and war is their only source of nourishment. In the eyes of whosoever created the Strogg this may have seemed advantageous because the Strogg would not require any resource other than the dead of the enemy- so they would fight out of their own thirst for blood. However, what the Strogg's creators may have failed to realise is that the Strogg need to kill in order to live, and they would kill their own creators too. If this was the case, the Strogg were like a Frankenstein's Monster gone seriously out-of-control who killed their own creators and unleashed needless terror onto other worlds. A marine aboard the Hannibal during the Second Stroggos Invasion said that someone had told him the Strogg are the "next step in human evolution" saying when you think how much humans rely on technology, this is not so far from being right. This supports the possibility the Strogg may be a very similar or parallel version of Earth, judging by their humanoid forms and their engineering methods (even down to the use of screws and floor tiles/bricks) being so similar to Earth, but their future was much darker than we would like. Strogg military designations The Strogg use a variery of different cybernetic constructs as soldiers. Here are some: *Marine *Grunt *Berserker *Gunner *Pro-Marine *Gladiator *Makron *Heavy Hover-Tank *Light Tank *Convoy *Hornet *Turret